IgE allergy diagnostics and other relevant tests in allergy, a World Allergy Organization position paper

Currently, testing for immunoglobulin E (IgE) sensitization is the cornerstone of diagnostic evaluation in suspected allergic conditions. This review provides a thorough and updated critical appraisal of the most frequently used diagnostic tests, both in vivo and in vitro. It discusses skin tests, challenges, and serological and cellular in vitro tests, and provides an overview of indications, advantages and disadvantages of each in conditions such as respiratory, food, venom, drug, and occupational allergy. Skin prick testing remains the first line approach in most instances; the added value of serum specific IgE to whole allergen extracts or components, as well as the role of basophil activation tests, is evaluated. Unproven, non-validated, diagnostic tests are also discussed. Throughout the review, the reader must bear in mind the relevance of differentiating between sensitization and allergy; the latter entails not only allergic sensitization, but also clinically relevant symptoms triggered by the culprit allergen.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Inclusiveness and Emptiness of <i>Gong Qi</i>: A Non-Anglophone Perspective on Ethics from a Sino-Japanese Corporation

This article introduces a non-Anglophone concept of gong qi(communal vessel, 公器) as a metaphor for ‘corporation’. It contributes an endogenous perspective from a Sino-Japanese organizational context that enriches mainstream business ethics literature, otherwise heavily reliant on Western traditions. We translate the multi-layered meanings of gong qi based on analysis of its ideograms, its references into classical philosophies, and contemporary application in this Japanese multinational corporation in China. Gong qi contributes a perspective that sees a corporation as an inclusive and virtuous social entity, and also addresses the elusive, implicit, and forever evolving nature of organizational life that is rarely noticed. We propose gong qi can be applied in other organizations and wider cultural contexts to show a new way of seeing and understanding business ethics and organization. Rather than considering virtue as a list of definable individual qualities, we suggest that the metaphor of gong qi reveals how virtue can be experienced as indeterminate, yet immanently present, like the substance of emptiness. This, then allows us to see the virtue of immanence, the beauty of implicitness, and hence, the efficacy of gong qi

Land Use Competition

This chapter introduces competition as a heuristic concept to analyse how specific land use practices establish themselves against possible alternatives. We briefly outline the global importance of land use practices as the material and symbolic basis for people’s livelihoods, particularly the provision of food security and well-being. We chart the development over time from research on land cover towards research on drivers of land use practices as part of an integrated land systems science. The increasingly spatially, temporally and functionally distributed nature of these drivers poses multiple challenges to research on land use practices. We propose the notion of ‘competition’ to respond to some of these challenges and to better understand how alternative land use practices are negotiated. We conceive of competition as a relational concept. Competition asks about agents in relation to each other, about the mode or the logic in which these relations are produced and about the material environments, practices and societal institutions through which they are mediated. While this has centrally to do with markets and prices, we deliberately open the concept to embrace more than economic perspectives. As such competition complements a broadening of analytical attention from the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘when’ to include prominently the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of particular land use practices and the question to whom this matters and ought to matter. We suggest that competition is an analytically productive concept, because it does not commit the analyst to a particular epistemological stance. It addresses reflexivity and feed-back, emergence and downward causation, history and response rates—concepts that all carry very different conceptual and analytical connotations in different disciplines. We propose to make these differences productive by putting them alongside each other through the notion of competition. Last not least, the heuristic lens of competition affords the combination of empirical and normative aspects, thus addressing land use practices in material, social and ethical terms